Professor Ignacio Cirac receives the Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honour

Ignacio Cirac is the Director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching near Munich in Germany. He is being awarded the Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honour in recognition of his truly outstanding contribution to the development of new theories about the future of information networks based on the laws of quantum mechanics.

"Ignacio Cirac is one of the pioneers in the quantum computing and quantum information theory and the Niels Bohr Institute wants to honour this very active and up and coming researcher with the Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honour,” says Professor Robert Feidenhans'l, Director of the Niels Bohr Institute.

Ignacio Cirac works in several main fields of quantum physics. He has developed, in collaboration with his colleague, Professor Peter Zoller, the first theory for a quantum computer based on ion traps. This theory, which opened for the first time the possibility to actually make a realistic quantum computer contributed to last year’s Nobel Prize in physics.

His work on optical lattices kick-started research into quantum simulation, which is now being studied in many laboratories. He is also working on the storage of quantum information, which can be used to transport information over long distances. He has also developed theories that make it easier to simulate complex physical systems on regular computers.